Are you looking to learn more about best free ecommerce cms? Or about best cms for ecommerce? Then look no further! You’ve come to the right place. You’ll find out what other successful business owners use, and how this can help your business.
By reading this article you may be able to realize some of the best benefits that you are going to get if you will use the Shopify cms. Some of the benefits that you are going to get with Shopify cms itself is the fact that it has a great user interface and it is really easy to use. Another benefit that comes with using Shopify is that you will get unlimited time and unlimited hosting for your website. There are also a lot of different templates that you can choose from.
Best Free Ecommerce Cms is a free, open-source ecommerce platform built on WordPress. With Best Free Ecommerce Cms, you can launch an online store in minutes—no coding required. It’s designed to be flexible and easy to use for beginners but powerful enough for more technical users interested in customizing their ecommerce site. Best Free Ecommerce Cms works with the plugins and themes you already know and love, making it seamless to integrate with all of your favorite tools.
As you may know, the ecommerce business is growing bigger every single year and leaving plenty of room behind for new startups to join the competition. If you are thinking about starting your own ecommerce business, you
The Open Source Ecommerce Platform Graveyard
On our original list, we had many popular platforms that are now defunct. These include:
- JigoShop (WordPress)
- WP Ecommerce (WordPress)
- Ubercart (Drupal)
- SimpleCart.js
- eCommerce
- Tomato Cart
- RokQuickCart (Joomla)
- Shoop
Because many open source projects rely on developers to provide development services for free, it’s always a labor of love. Countless developers pour hours of time into these projects and often get nothing in return.
Maintaining source code is a lot of work, and if there aren’t enough developers contributing to the project, it’s easy for it to fall behind in terms of security and features. This translates to fewer users overall, which makes the project less popular. Eventually, usage and development dwindle, and the platform disappears.
With the surge in software as a service (SaaS) ecommerce platforms, open-source business apps are falling by the wayside. Considering a platform like BranchBob offers free ecommerce platforms with hosting included, there’s less demand for open-source software.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the world’s most popular eCommerce platform. It’s a completely free software that you can download and run on any web hosting provider.
Since WooCommerce doesn’t provide hosting for you, you’ll need to buy web hosting and a domain name to make sure your website can be accessed by users worldwide.
We recommend using either Bluehost or SiteGround. They are both among the largest hosting companies in the world and are officially recommended by WooCommerce.
Bluehost is even offering WPBeginner users a free domain name + SSL certificate, and a generous 60% discount on hosting. Basically, you can get started for $2.75 per month.
Pros
- It’s easy to get started with WooCommerce. You can create an online store quickly even if you’re a total beginner.
- You’ll be hosting your website yourself, which gives you full control. Although you’ll need to pay for WooCommerce hosting, but this doesn’t have to cost a lot.
- There are loads of WooCommerce themes (designs), giving you the opportunity to create a store that truly reflects your brand.
- There are thousands of WooCommerce plugins that you can use to add new features and grow your business.
- You can sell anything with WooCommerce whether its physical products, digital downloads, membership plans, dropshipping store, or affiliate products.
- WooCommerce doesn’t charge you any transaction fees at all. You’ll only have to pay your payment service provider like PayPal or Stripe, or your bank.
Cons
- If you’re a total beginner, WooCommerce is a bit trickier to get started with than some other options. You’ll need to buy hosting and a domain name, for instance.
- You’ll be responsible for maintaining your online store as it grows. This might mean upgrading your hosting plan or paying for a security plugin for WordPress.
Web.com Website Builder
Web.com website builder doesn’t have a free plan, but it offers a very affordable plan that allows you to create an online store without spending a lot of money.
Web.com will host the store and even provide you with a free custom domain and free SSL certificate.
You’ll be able to have up to 500 products in your store, accept credit cards, track & manage your orders, link to Facebook marketplace, and more.
Pros
- You can build an online store for with Web.com drag & drop website builder. You can get a free custom domain name of your choosing.
- You can sell both physical and digital products through your store. You can use Web.com to track your inventory.
- There’s 24/7 email and live chat support available.
- You can add a blog to your store’s website for free, though the blogging software is very basic and doesn’t offer the same features as a blogging platform like WordPress.
- Pricing is very affordable starting only at $3.95 per month for eCommerce plan.
Cons
- The eCommerce features are not as powerful as WooCommerce or Shopify.
BuyNow Plus
BuyNow Plus is not a full eCommerce platform. Instead, it lets you create “buy now” buttons that you can put on any website.
You’ll need to create a free Stripe account in order to use BuyNow Plus.
Pros
- The transaction fee is pretty low at just 2% per transaction. Keep in mind that Stripe charges its own transaction fees on top of this, though.
- You can use BuyNow Plus to handle recurring payments on credit cards without your customers needing to set up an account. If you’re selling recurring memberships for offline items, then this is a really handy feature.
- You can put the button links on social media as well as on your website, or you can even use them in emails.
- There’s no limit to how many different products you can sell using BuyNow Plus.
Cons
- BuyNow Plus doesn’t offer anything extra, like inventory tracking or website creation.
- You could do something similar by using Stripe directly on your website. That way, you wouldn’t need to pay BuyNow Plus’s transaction fee. You’d need your own SSL certificate, but it’s possible to get an SSL certificate for free.
Square Online – Best Overall Free Ecommerce Platform
If you’re not particularly eager to join the Wix premium plan bandwagon, you might want to try out Square Online.
Now, for a long time, Square had fundamentally existed as a versatile payment solution. Until it finally decided to spread its wings by setting up a multi-faceted business ecosystem. You can read our full Square Online review.
So far, quite a number of people are aware that Square increasingly facilitates merchants dealing with physical businesses restaurants, coffee shops, and so forth. While that’s fairly accurate, it turns out that Square has now grown to be much more than that.
In essence, the platform offers a myriad of extensive features plus integrations that not only support brick and mortar businesses, but also ecommerce websites.
And no, we’re not only talking about digital payments here. But rather, the entire ecommerce framework. Square offers tools for pretty much all the critical online store functions- from inventory management and sales, to marketing and team coordination.
All things considered, the most outstanding feature here is the ability to set up a fully-functional ecommerce website for free.
You don’t need to pay anything to build an online store. Not even for hosting. In fact, you can proceed without the slightest bit of knowledge about coding.
Creating free ecommerce websites with Square is as easy as 1-2-3. After you select an ideal theme from the array of predesigned customizable options, just make some tweaks, and voila!
Ultimately, you’ll achieve the full online store experience. And in case the default features happen to be inadequate, you can leverage Square’s integrations to link your free ecommerce website with third-party apps for booking and scheduling, employee and inventory management, accounting, plus much more.
But that’s not all. If you have some coding tricks up your sleeve, you can consider capitalizing on the Square Connect API to build your own specialized integrations. Otherwise, it’s also possible to link free ecommerce sites with their corresponding offline brick and mortar counterparts. This feature alone is particularly handy for streamlined multi-store selling and product management.
That said, I can guess what you might be wondering at this point. How the heck does Square generate revenue from this?
Well, interestingly, there are no ecommerce web monthly plans on this platform. Not even one. Instead, it basically charges a fixed rate of 2.9% plus 30¢ for each online transaction. Therefore, ecommerce sites are genuinely free on a permanent basis.
Ecwid
Ecwid essentially translates to “ecommerce widgets”. And just like the name suggests, this is not a distinctive ecommerce platform. Check out the detailed Ecwid review.
Instead, it’s a shopping cart that you can integrate with any site to transform it into a fully-fledged online store. However, as you might have guessed already, you need some lines of code to achieve that.
While Ecwid offers three paid packages, it also provides a free option- which, unlike Jimdo, comes with decent ecommerce capabilities. Apart from unlimited bandwidth, you get a mobile responsive design, two product categories, and support for 10 items.
Sadly, you won’t be able to sell digital products at that level. Plus, your online store functionalities will be limited to a one-page ecommerce website. The only way to escape from that, of course, is subscribing to one of the premium plans, which start at $15 per month.
nopCommerce
nopCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform, developed on ASP.NET technology and powering more than 60,000 live stores. The platform has been downloaded more than 3,000,000 times. Due to its flexible architecture it is easy to develop custom functionality and follow any business requirements. For those who don’t have much technical knowledge, there exists a pre-installed version.
nopCommerce offers powerful sales and marketing tools for both B2B and B2C such as multi-store or multi-vendor out-of-the-box. The platform is absolutely free, hence there is a $250 white-label fee to remove the “Powered by nopCommerce” link from the footer of the site.
Who’s Using nopCommerce?
- Volvo Cars Collection
- Harman / Kardon
- Turkish airlines
Magento Community Edition
With more than 200,000 users, the Magento Community Edition is one of the most popular open source ecommerce platforms available. Although it isn’t as robust as the Magento Enterprise edition, the Magento Open source Community Edition is still a strong choice for ecommerce stores that are committed to the idea of an free platform.
Who’s Using Magento Community or Magento Enterprise?
- Hello!Lucky
- Brewshop (New Zealand)
- Hu2 (UK, ships worldwide)
- Blik
- Bonobos
Is Open Source Ecommerce Really Free?
Open source ecommerce solutions offer a wide range of features and complexity. Before choosing one, you need to be honest with yourself about your web developer skills and your budget to pay for support and help. Regardless of price point, however, an open source platform with an active developer community offers the benefit of a global community of people working to improve the software.
At the same time, it’s usually the freemium plans that have a dedicated team of full-time developers and support. If you need help and you aren’t using a freemium open source platform with the option of paid technical help, you might find yourself in trouble if you come across a new bug in the code.
Conclusion
Online shopping could be an enormous market if a website is not on the internet. So, there should be a solid technology behind it. For this purpose, the best free ecommerce cms are used. They have lots of features like build in shipping calculator, abandoned cart reminder , product feed, search engine friendly design and many more. People can easily use them as per their requirements.
Open source ecommerce platforms can be a great option for merchants who want to use and customize open source code. Whether you’re creating a marketplace, online store or subscription business, you can use open source software to customize the experience and add new functionalities.